86. Fear of Loss Trumps Anticipation of Gain

You are preparing a presentation for your project team in which you will suggest that the team change the method they use for the next project. Should you base the presentation on all the advantages that the new method will give the team (anticipation of gain) or on the possible problems and things that will go wrong if they don’t change to the new method (fear of loss)?

One of my favorite pieces of research on unconscious mental processing was conducted by Antoine Bechara and his team (1997). Participants in the study played a gambling game with decks of cards. Each person received $2000 of pretend money. They were told that the goals were to lose as little of the $2000 as possible and to try to make as much over the $2000 as possible. There were four decks of cards on the table. Each participant turned over a card from any of the four decks, one card at a time, and continued turning over cards from the deck of their choice until the experimenter told them to stop. The subjects didn’t know when the game would end. They were told that they earned money every time they turned over a card. They were also told that sometimes when they turned over a card, they earned money but also lost money (by paying it to the experimenter). The participants didn’t know any of the rules of the gambling game. Here are what the rules actually were: